Classical CDs of the week: Rachmaninov, Wolf, Antheil and more...

Martin Cousin: discretion and formidable technique

12:01AM GMT 18 Mar 2006

Rachmaninov: Piano Sonata No 1; Morceaux de Salon Op 10

Martin Cousin (piano) SOMMCD 048, £12.99

Martin Cousin's debut disc establishes a striking new benchmark for the interpretation of Rachmaninov's First Piano Sonata. Composed in 1907, in between the Second Symphony and The Isle of the Dead, it has never really caught on to the same extent as either the Second Sonata or the sets of preludes and études-tableaux. But the sense and sensibility of Cousin's playing bring it right back to the forefront.

Anybody who has shied away from the First Sonata because it can seem discursive, or because it can equally sound overweight, need only listen to Cousin for a more positive and persuasive view. His performance is not slim-line in any sense: the sonata comes across with ample romantic passion, its impulses strong, its textures ripe and robust. The piece demands a formidable technique, which Cousin possesses, but there is something extra here, both in the clarity of the music's complex, interweaving lines and in Cousin's command of the ebb and flow of its structure.

Look at the score, and you see that Rachmaninov's scheme of tempos and dynamics is there to be observed. If some pianists have preferred to cut a swathe through it and saddle the sonata with its barnstorming reputation, that is not Cousin's way. His has discretion, judgment and perception. The early Morceaux de Salon are similarly given a fresh image on a disc that merits attention from anyone who values thoughtful pianism that strips away preconceptions. Geoffrey Norris

Wolf: Orchestral Songs

Orchestrally accompanied songs were increasingly popular in the 1890s. Hugo Wolf capitalised on this by scoring 24 of his songs for forces ranging from clarinets, horns and harp (the incantatory Gesang Weylas ) to a massive Wagnerian panoply, as in Prometheus and the setting for chorus and orchestra of the diabolical Der Feuerreiter.

Wolf feared that his orchestral writing would drown the singers. There is no danger of that here, though inevitably the intimacy of the piano originals is lost. Wolf's debt to his idol Wagner, too, becomes even more apparent in his orchestrations. In Mignon, for instance, Goethe's fragile waif is transported to the febrile, neurasthenic world of Tristan, while In der Frühe and Seufzer sound as if they have strayed from Parsifal.

It would be hard to imagine finer performances, vocally and orchestrally, than these. Juliane Banse is tender, poignant and sensuous, and rises magnificently to the challenge of Mignon. Dietrich Henschel, often sounding uncannily like Fischer-Dieskau, catches all the tormented yearning of the religious songs, and brings a nonchalant bravado to Der Rattenfänger, where Wolf's garish, glittering orchestration brilliantly enhances the original. Richard Wigmore

(1900-1959) sparked a furore in Paris when he gave a recital of his own piano works in 1923. This was the same Paris that had been so aghast at Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring a decade earlier, and, if you listen to Antheil's First Piano Concerto (1922), you can sense something similar in

the propulsive, dislocated rhythms echoing the Rite and in the clear references to Petrushka in the concerto's final section.

A Jazz Symphony (1923-5) incorporates jazz idioms in much the same jokey way as Milhaud did in Le Boeuf sur le toit. Antheil's music has a similar snook-cocking character, in a deliberate effort to counter what he saw as the "mountainous sentiment" of Strauss and the "fluid diaphanous lechery" of the Impressionists. These works might have lost their power to shock, but they are interesting signs of their times, and, in such pieces as the mechanistic Sonatina and Death of Machines, it is easy to imagine Paris provoked to fisticuffs. Geoffrey Norris

This is a document of the occasion last August when Daniel Barenboim and his West-Eastern Divan Orchestra finally managed to give their first concert in the West Bank city of Ramallah. To understand fully the circumstances one really needs to see the separately available double DVD, also from Warner (2564-627920-2), which in addition to a film of the concert includes documentaries on the orchestra and the musicians' historic journey - and particularly that of the Israeli contingent - to the Palestinian cultural centre.

So one's assessment of the performances on this CD cannot ignore the context of their creation, though the DVD inevitably makes more of it. Nonetheless, the audio version retains Barenboim's passionate closing speech, with the message that "either we all kill each other or share what there is to share".

And it is sharing that makes the account of Mozart's wind Sinfonia concertante so engaging: this is true ensemble work. The darkness-to-light journey of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony brings its own message, with the orchestra's superb playing and Barenboim's vision making for a performance of blazing force. The encore of "Nimrod" from Elgar's Enigma Variations comes across as a passionate plea for peace. Matthew Rye

Delectatio angeli: Music of Love, Longing and Lament

Catherine Bott and Friends Hyperion CDA67549, £12.99

Delectable is just the right word for this sequence of pieces sung by Catherine Bott, with and without the fiddles of Pavlo Beznosiuk and Mark Levy. It suggests that, where music from the 13th and 14th centuries is concerned, less can certainly be more. The simplicity and spontaneity of the pared-down and often improvisatory approach enormously enhances the emotional impact of the music, and brings the listener extraordinarily close to the characters whose deepest feelings are being voiced.

Catherine Bott's spellbinding unaccompanied performance of the 13th-century Prisoner's Song, Ar ne kuth ich sorghe non, is a true tour de force, imbued with an anguished desperation made the more powerful by her hushed singing.

Equally powerful is the bitter, misogynist diatribe in Bernart de Ventadorn's Can vei la lauzeta mover, while Etienne de Meaux's Trop est mes maris jalos provides a vivid portrait of the spirited wife of a jealous husband. Similar immediacy and intensity also characterise three Dufay chansons, and adding greater sophistication to a programme of music that is plainly very close to the performers' hearts. Elizabeth Roche

Schönberg: Five Orchestral Pieces Op 16

By the time Mahler was wringing the last ounces of emotional power from the traditional tonal system in his last symphonies, Arnold Schönberg had already cut himself loose from tonality altogether. The problem was that, without the framework that the interaction of major and minor keys provides, it was difficult to maintain long spans of music. His solution, in part and until he came up with his 12-note system, was brevity.

The whole set of Schönberg's Five Orchestral Pieces of 1909, the nearest he came to writing a symphony, lasts less than 20 minutes.

In the equally revolutionary Pierrot lunaire of three years later he would at least have the crutch of words; here his music was on its own, and with his aim to write wholly chromatic music without motivic and tonal structure he succeeded in breaking the bounds of music in a way every bit as remarkable as Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring a few years later.

Simon Rattle recorded Schönberg's Orchestral Pieces in the late 1980s with the CBSO. The performance of the work exemplifies everything that made this partnership so successful: Rattle's ability to illuminate every strand of complex scores and the players' ability to bring his vision to life.

The shock element, in defining Schönberg's Expressionist array of emotional extremes, is particularly vivid, yet there is also a telling exposition of his use of orchestral colour, which for the composer was as important a weapon in his armoury as rhythm, melody and harmony.

Christoph von Dohnányi's account with the Cleveland Orchestra on Decca (Double Decca 448 279-2) provides the only obvious budget rival - as detailed a performance as Rattle's but less revolutionary in feel. Rattle's also benefits from coming with no less riveting recordings of Webern's Six Orchestral Pieces and Berg's Lulu Suite. Matthew Rye